The electronics industry has experienced an ever increasing demand for smaller and faster electronic devices which are simultaneously able to support a greater number of increasingly complex and sophisticated functions. Accordingly, there is a continuing trend in the semiconductor industry to manufacture low-cost, high-performance, and low-power integrated circuits (ICs). Thus far these goals have been achieved in large part by scaling down semiconductor IC dimensions (e.g., minimum feature size) and thereby improving production efficiency and lowering associated costs. However, such scaling has also introduced increased complexity to the semiconductor manufacturing process. Thus, the realization of continued advances in semiconductor ICs and devices calls for similar advances in semiconductor manufacturing processes and technology.
For example, while prior semiconductor technology generations may have been relatively more tolerant of defects and/or other wafer non-uniformities, the continued scaling of ICs has put more stringent constraints on the quantity and size of defects, as well as on wafer uniformity, that is acceptable for high-quality material layers and devices. In various examples, epitaxial layer growth has been used to form a variety of material layers useful for the fabrication of a semiconductor device. However, in at least some existing processes, a number and/or size of epitaxial layer defects (e.g., formed during epitaxial layer growth) remaining after epitaxial layer growth may not be well-suited for the fabrication of advanced semiconductor devices and circuits. In some cases, non-uniformity of epitaxially-grown layers may also be problematic for device and/or circuit fabrication.
Thus, existing techniques have not proved entirely satisfactory in all respects.